You are currently browsing the Techy category.
The more irritated I get with Facebook and other sites who keep changing their privacy policies and yanking around my information without me fully understanding what they are doing or when they are going to start doing that, these four guys and their project makes perfect sense to me. So, I helped fund it!
I am a big fan (sucker?) for the end of the year summaries that abound at this time of year.
And, I love lists. So, here is a list of lists….
Presenting my faves for the end of 2009 and the end of the first decade of the 2000s (naughties? noughties? oughts? aughts? What did we call them?)
DJ Earworm – United States of Pop 2009
NPR All Songs Considered Best Music of 2009
I always find new music via NPR’s All Songs Considered
Lifehacker’s Most Popular Hive Five Topics of 2009
Crowdsourcing has grown in popularity, easy and usefulness. And why not? It usually works!
Entertainment Weekly’s Best of 2009 (highs and lows)
Since this is my guilty pleasure reading at the gym, I felt that I must put it in here
The Top 10 Everything of 2009 and the Best Movies, TV, Books and Theater of the Decade from Time Magazine
well, they said everything…
Top 10 Internet Moments of the Decade from ABC News
And, for good measure, I just had to use the “My Year in Status” application in Facebook to build a status collage for 2009.
I also had to go visit Wordle and do something there with my blog posts from 2009. And, here it is.
This blog has a tagline about exploring “both sides” of the brain and I do try to explore and nurture both the techy and the feely of life. Of course, I am always interested when they intersect.
Part of the official parts of my job is to be technical support for the faculty and staff at my school. In all of my previous jobs, I have always been the unofficial technical support mostly because I was one of the first to use it and one of the first who understood it enough to explain it to others. Beyond my work life, I have also become the “go to” girl for tech support for many of my friends as well. You don’t get the nickname “Computer Girl” (as I was christened by one friend) without some geek cred, I would think.
It has been rare when I find myself on the other side of a technical support issue. By the time I actually break down and call a tech support line, I have exhausted all other possibilities. I have done the obvious (and sometimes the ridiculous) testing, rebooting, Google research, etc. It’s a pride thing, I suppose.
So, when my Twitter account suddenly was no longer “findable” via search or when I used hashtags (those phrases that begin with # that are often used to tag a tweet about an event like a conference), I was concerned. Since I am supposed to be coordinating the “twitterverse” for two upcoming conferences, I was getting more and more worried about my account being broken. I searched for suggestions and looked through the FAQ at the support site for Twitter and, of course, opened a support ticket with them. Nothing seemed to be working.
Then, I found a Twitter support person on Twitter. I started following him and then sent a direct plea his way. He became my “go to guy” and shortly after that, he send me a message back telling me all was well. And, it was!
I am grateful that he fixed the issue. Even more, I am grateful to be reminded of what it is like to feel out of control and unable to solve a technical problem and what it feels like to find someone who can, who does and does it well. I will use that as a reminder to keep doing what I do for my friends and co-workers and try to do it well, quickly and without complaint.
Thanks @lukester for that!
I have a ukulele now. And I take piano lessons. Add in the drum set in the basement and the guitar in the closet and there are a lot of musical opportunities in the house these days. Right now, the uke is the winner…it sits out by my desk and I pick it up about every day. Can’t say I practice any of the rest of the instruments that much.
Of course, I am only playing the one song I know right now (I’m Yours by Jason Mraz) but the more I play it, the easier it gets. Practice makes perfect.
All of this leads up to something that I have been thinking about for a while but never got down to writing about it until now. We went to hear Steve Martin play his banjo this weekend at the lovely Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Yes, the home of the Grand Ole Opry! It was my first show there and I hope it won’t be my last as it was a great performance space. Wonderful acoustics, fun pews (not TOO hard) and a top-notch show to boot. Steve Martin was a pro with the banjo and his band was phenomenal.
Add in the fact that his opening act was the multi-talented John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and that he had guest vocals from Dan Tyminski and Rhonda Vincent as well as closed the show with Earle Scruggs playing Foggy Mountain Breakdown and you get the gist that it was a truly wonderful night of music.
But, what I have been thinking about was how easy they all made it look. McEuen went from guitar to banjo to fiddle without even taking a breath it seemed. If I put down the uke and sit at the piano, I have to fidget and think and get all set up to get going. It is amazing how at ease he seemed with all of the instruments and just being on stage. And, I know it comes from practice.
To take it from music to techy – I can sit down at a Mac and then move to a PC and then to an iPhone with the same ease. I have been told many times during training “you make it seem so easy”. And, that is my goal – to make it seem easy but to also really just make it easy. But, there does take some practice. Some time with the “instrument” whether it is an operating system or a software application or a new peripheral. You have to spend some time with it and learn how to work it, where things are and so on. Then, moving between all of these things gets to be much smoother. And, just like how a guitar player can probably pick up a uke and make some decent noises – the more tech you play with the easier it is to pick up something new just because of all of the practice you did before.
A colleague reminded me of Wordle. I truly find it beautiful. Both in the elegance that the Java app works (cannot say that about all java apps!) and in the actual creation of the tool. So, without further ado, here is my Wordle based on current tags in my delicious account!
Driving home yesterday, I heard a story on NPR about the last mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. This mission is the last repair mission (and the first one in seven year, it seems) and the story told a bit about the repairs and how it will help the mighty instrument be even more “mightier”.
But what struck me the most was the part of the story about the astronauts also taking the feelings of the engineers and scientists with them on this last visit. The science team with Hubble have been working on it for decades. This last mission has to be a hard one to take – even though it was once cancelled completely.
The part of the story that stayed with me:
He notes that every astronaut who goes to Hubble leaves a mark on the observatory. “Even just putting your hand on the telescope affects the surface coating juts a little bit,” he says, “and so you can see handprints and things like that, and so it’s clear that people have been working on this telescope.”
Another astronaut who will do spacewalks and repair work on this mission, Mike Massimino, says he recently saw a good friend who has worked on the Hubble project for a long time. “He said, ‘Make sure, your last time on that telescope, you give it a pat for me,’ ” Massimino says.
So, he will give Hubble a special goodbye pat on behalf of all the people who have worked with it. “I hope that that’s going to be in my mind as I’m letting go of the telescope for the last time, my one last handshake with it,” Massimino says.
I do like having a connection with the techonlogy I use. The admins snickered at me but when I was finally allowed into the server room at school so I could see the electronic “box” where all of my online courses lived, it felt good to see it physically. Made it more real, I guess.
I recalled how I feel when I get or let go of a piece of technology. Especially something that I have used and loved for a long time (harder to do now, it seems, with the disposable nature of much of our tech)… Don’t have it yet with cell phones but I certainly loved my Mac SE (and my PowerMac 6100 and my PowerComputing clone and..well, you get the idea – don’t even get me started on my iMac!). I love my record player and my records. I have been digitizing cassettes for a year now and it is still so hard to put those cassettes into the trash or recycling bin..even though I have the music from them safely esconsced in electrons on two hard drives. Americans LOVE their cars..that qualifies. Chefs love their knives. I’m sure the list goes on.
What tech makes you feel?
Image: ‘I Love Tech Tshirt‘
www.flickr.com/photos/25528051@N06/3361211971
This is just darn cool technology and a great message to boot.
As I continue to look over the impressive technology and social media used for Earth Hour 2009, I found this part of the site. Print out a little graphic, point it to your webcam and BAM – you have the world in your hand.
I am intrigued to know how it works but also rather happy with just going with the whole “it’s magic” thing!
So, Facebook made some changes to their Terms of Service (TOS) and it caused a major uproar in the blogosphere, on the Twitterosphere (is that a word? Twitterspace? Twitterverse – I think that is what I have seen before.
Anyhoo – at first, I was like, all, Wha? They can just use my stuff? But, then I realized that I just put up exactly that….stuff. Silly photos, comments, and the occasional link or trivia game. Nothing that would awful to lose.
But, I will caution folks who use Facebook for marketing (and I have a talk on that this week to a PR group – time to edit my remarks!). And, I will think twice about what I am putting up there – as we all should.
I thought the comment from Adam Ostrow on Mashable was spot on – it probably won’t change the way we do stuff. But, we do need to remember that nothing on the internet is ever “totally gone”…nothing.
So, if you plan to run for President. Be careful and use an alias on Facebook!
Facebook Responds to Concerns Over Terms of Service
Chances are Facebook won’t abuse the privileges they are granted under their TOS. The backlash over doing something insane like using member photos without permission would be enormous and Facebook is smart enough not to do it. But as a user, it’s another reminder that what you do on the Internet is probably permanent, and much of it, probably outside your control.
Leave it to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to come up with another cool way to engage us in their research. I have always enjoyed their backyard bird studies that allow folks from all over the world to gather data from their own world and share it with the scientists at Cornell.
Now, they have CamClickr (missing a vowel, of course,so it must be cool!) which is done entirely online. This is a game-like environment that helps analyze their catalog of nest cameras. From the site:
Now we are enhancing this learning experience by introducing, CamClickr, a year-round citizen science project carried out completely online that allows cam viewers to “tag” and classify breeding behaviors from our archived images. CamClickr will help us answer questions that can only be answered using the cams while providing scientists with a tool to search and sort images once they are tagged. It’s fun, easy, and promises to change the way you think about breeding behavior! Try it for yourself and see if you can become the top CamClickr!
This is clearly engaging, really science and just kinda fun. The sorta thing I wish I had done when I worked in the informal science field.
Image: ‘The Navigator‘
www.flickr.com/photos/53991500@N00/53742127
